It is no coincidence that in the information society the ways of life acquire a greater importance and interest in the public opinion, with crisis of without. There are two fundamental reasons for it: the greater knowledge that information gives as well as making more consciously aware of what can one be,and at the same time the capacity that information per se has to shape our lives by utilizing technology or through other means.
International newspapers like The Wall Street Journal and Financial Times have made part of their sections of life style the ones that have most readers and subscribers in print form as well in video and internet. But you can say the same about millions of communications mediums at different scales; from personal blogs, to local businesses, county and industrial brands, which have made their products, lifestyle, and philosophy, a way of life.
Your life style is an integral part of you, and at the same time it requires that you be your own being.There is no leeway for imposture, it is not a superficial expression but an intimate and transcendental, because you to internalize the things you believe in, that you think about, and that you prefer.
Little after my arrival in London in 1973 to work as a correspondent I did interview to Mary Quant, which was the one who had made fashionable the miniskirts. The interview took place at her office in Chelsea, and I still remember how she tried to differentiate between fashion and life style. Wearing something fashionable can be something superficial-and by its own nature-a ´fling´, not a life style. She wasn´t at all superficial and her creative fashionable ideas neither, because she adhered to a philosophy.
[When I now see illustrated reports on tv or articles telling the history about Mary Quant and the way women dress, I can´t stop to contrast those who defend women to make them equal to men have to devaluate their femininity. Human beings are equal as persons, but we are differents by nature and sex.]
They way of life reflects on everything. In your habits, costumes, your environment, and preferences. When you travel in a the public transportation system you develop a ´looking´ exercise. Everybody watches everybody, and by their expressions, they way they dress, what they read, personal features and attitudes, each one of us ends up imagining the others life style. When you just arrive to a city, just by going in the public transport you´ll discover how cosmopolitan is the this society.
Theodore Zeldin, philosopher and historian, author of the book “An intimate history of humanity“, he uncovers very different types of life style that human beings have made their own in order to make a better civilization. Science, says Zeldin with a lot of examples and cases of his investigations “is also the art of giving sense and beauty, which implies finding connections between things that don´t seem to have none, by linking people, places, desires and memories, through details that might pass you by” (pg.17).
A person is not free unless he or she feels free, and the lifestyle you choose is the foundation of that liberty and personal feelings. The greatest threat against the individual liberties is not only totalitarism in its different forms but imposture. They are frequently tied together.
A.S ©
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